Lying Media

LemmingsLeap #29: Lying Media

If Trump has been wrong about many things, he’s been right about calling out the media for lying. Before we get any farther, we need to define the word media. Media, as we know it, is all of the various ways we receive information. That would include printed matter, TV, radio and internet. But wait! There’s more! Billboards and signs, LED message boards on gas pumps and beside the road to tell us hot coffee is inside or a hazard is ahead, clothing with its various messages and logos that bring to our conscious or unconscious mind a catch phrase associated with a company or group. When we consider all these media outlets, we cannot leave out our motion picture industry. If we were fish, media would be our water.

Who owns the media?

As of this moment, 6 corporations control 90% of the media. Fifteen billionaires control those 6 corporations. I was unable to find statistics on how much the entire media of the US is worth, but I did find some interesting statistics on the worth of parts of the media. For instance, the digital TV media exceeds $100 billion while the worldwide worth of the gaming sector came to $83 billion with the movie industry worth only $34 billion. The revenue of the print industry is nearly $30 billion alone. These are only pieces of the picture that indicate we are talking about a considerable amount of money.

Why Should I Care?

It has consistently been shown that whenever an industry gets concentrated in the hands of a few, the lack of competition results in price increases for the goods and services that the industry offers. This is the issue about monopolies that first hits you. None of us like being gouged and that is what a company with a monopoly on goods or services will do. We saw what can happen on a small scale with Hurricane Katrina when some enterprising businesses jacked the price of a gallon of gas to $20 and a case of water to $99. This happens on a larger scale when a corporation gets a monopoly or near monopoly. Check out what the pharmaceutical industry has done to drug prices. The small amount of people controlling the media rake in a fortune every year from their interests. This money can be used to buy congressmen or a senator perhaps influence a department head. But there are more reasons one should care than just money.

If one owns the media, one can use various methods of making your case so that people believe it. Everyone knows the best way to accomplish this is to lie. There’s a plethora of ways to do this.

Just Lie

Anyone can do this. All you have to do is make up some shit and there you have it! The problem with this kind of lying is that there is no groundwork laid most of the time so you are liable to be easily discovered by a close examination of your statement.

Big Lie

Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda for the Nazis in WWII, put his finger right on the trigger when he said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” You can’t lie about the Iraqis not liking apple pie. That’s too small of a lie to even be worth the effort. A great big lie is in order: “The Iraqis have yellow cake uranium and we will soon be a mushroom cloud.” Notice how it is not only a big lie, but it brings the listener into it with the word, “we.” If you repeat this several hundred times a day through several hundred news outlets, you will soon have people believing you enough that they give you big guns an lots of money to rectify the situation.

Retractable Lie

It’s a little known fact that the inventor of the retractable dog leash took his inspiration from the retractable lie. The way this lie works is you put it out there and when it looks as if the jig is up, you retract it. The key is to retract it in an obscure place at an obscure time so that a lot of people who believed it in the first place will continue to believe it. Case in point is the yellow cake lie mentioned above. It’s been 17 years since the lie was used to start the Iraqi war and there are still people who believe that Sadam was going to turn us into mushrooms.

Lie of Omission

This type of lie is well used. All one has to do is leave out what one doesn’t want publicized. This is done expertly in history books. For instance, we learned in school that Columbus was a hero sailing uncharted waters to discover the Americas and open up the new land for colonization. The history book never mentioned that colonization meant the destruction of the civilization that was already here. In fact, we are led to believe that this was a wild continent with no civilization. Another omission was that as soon as Columbus got to the new world, he was met by friendly, unarmed natives who were peaceful. Perfect! No resistance to the immediate killing, torture, rape and enslavement of the native population.

A more recent example can be found in Venezuela. All over the media, Venezuela is proclaimed as a failure of socialism. Pictures of its starving and rioting people are shown and much is made of its inability to take care of its people because the government is broke. Nowhere are you told that for the last twenty years the United States has waged economic war against this country and is currently refusing access to billions of dollars in accounts for oil they sold or that the UK, trusted with Venezuela’s gold, has refused to release any of it to the Venezuelan government. With at least two of the world’s largest economies waging war on you and not being able to access your funds for the one export your country has- no wonder they are in an economic mess, the kind of mess lies bring.

The Don’t Shit On the Boss Lie

If you found out your boss did something really bad, how would you report it as a reporter working for a news outlet the boss owned? That’s right, you would bury the story and forget about it or you would lose your job. This is actually a form of self-censorship, but it becomes a lie because the truth is not told.

When I started this, I didn’t realize how many different kinds of lies there are. I have only touched on some of them and don’t want to take it any farther. There are other ways of manipulating public opinion that I haven’t even discussed yet. Situations can be constructed or one that came along by chance can be used to focus our attention away from what is really happening. Sneaky legislation is handled this way. Fridays have proven to be good days to make announcements and votes Congress doesn’t want anyone to know about.

The point of this is not to show how many lies there are but to show the reader how important it is that the media give us facts instead of opinion. If we don’t have the correct facts, we cannot make an informed decision on what course of action to take. This carries over to both the social and political beliefs and actions of the populace. The fact is that we are being propagandized and led toward a fascist state. Much of what we think we know, we truly don’t. For instance, we are led to believe that our country is “exceptional.” This is pounded into our heads from every direction and allows our leaders to literally get away with murder. Propaganda is for control. The book was already written by Hitler. He outlined how he was going to take power in Germany prior to WWII. Those writings along with the huge advances in the understanding of how the human mind works and can be influenced are the primary tools being used to keep us in our place while stripping the country of its freedom and its wealth.